SHARE: A superordinate online rural community

Abstract

AbstractComprehensive School Reform in Rural K‐8 Schools in the Southeast: Integrative Technologies for Quality Initiatives is a three‐year technology intervention funded by the US Department of Education. As part of this project, teachers in eight rural K‐8 schools in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama were given access to an online community Web‐portal built on Sakai called SHARE (Schools Helping to Advance Rural Education). This Web‐portal supports the project's goal to expand teachers' ability to access and exchange information by providing server space for each school community as well as the larger project community. Through SHARE, communities of teachers at the school level can create a new community of information exchange among all project teachers and across all project schools. The exchange at the higher project level creates a superordinate level.Data collected through multiple methods is used to make comparisons between teachers' attitudes and online information exchange practices in base‐level communities and in the larger superordinate community established through the SHARE Web‐portal. The four‐tier pyramid of Hersberger, Murray, and Rioux (2007) is used to inform the evaluation of the teachers' information sharing activities and to assist in the assessment of the overall level of gratification or discontentment of the project's community of teachers.